Patriarchy theory (42949)

Patriarchy Theory

The
theory of patriarchy, which says that there is a fundamental division
between men and women from which men gain power, is accepted without
question today by most of the left. The theory was developed by
feminists such as Juliet Mitchell and Miriam Dixson who, in her book
The Real Matilda,
was inclined to blame Irish working class men for women’s
oppression, using the theory of patriarchy as the basis for her
argument. Anne Summers helped to popularise the ideas in her book Damned Whores and God’s Police
in the early seventies. She wrote «Women are expected to be
socially dependent and physically passive because this state is
claimed to be necessary for their maternal role. In fact it is
because it enhances the power of men.»

But
there was some resistance to the idea that all men have power over
women, especially from women and men influenced by the Marxist idea
that class differences are fundamental in society. Heidi Hartmann, in
her essay The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,
attempted to provide a bridge between what are fundamentally opposing
views. Hartmann purported to provide a materialist analysis of
patriarchy. While capitalists exploit the labour of workers at work,
men gained control over women’s labour in the family. This has
been the theoretical starting point for much of Australian feminist
writing over the past ten to fifteen years. However, Hartmann did not
challenge the central idea of Mitchell and others, which is that
there is such an identifiable social relation as patriarchy.
Patriarchy, Hartmann says, «largely organizes reproduction,
sexuality, and childrearing.»

The
arguments of patriarchy theory have been adequately dealt with by the
British Socialist Workers’ Party. The purpose of this article
is to begin the much-needed task of examining the theory of
patriarchy by drawing on the Australian experience from the
standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. I will briefly outline the
theoretical method underlying Marxism and how it differs from the
theory of patriarchy. It is necessary to do this because most
feminist arguments against «Marxism» are in fact replies
to the mechanical «Marxism» either of the Second
International from the early 1890’s to 1914 or of Stalinism.
Secondly I will show that the historical arguments made by feminists
do not stand up to any objective examination. Their determination to
make facts fit an untenable theory leads them to distortions and
misinterpretation. So I will look at the origins of the family in
Australia and the role of the concept of a family wage in the
workplace.

Finally,
but most importantly, I will show that the ideas of male power and
patriarchy have led the women’s movement into an abyss. They
have no answer to how women’s oppression can be fought.
Rosemary Pringle, in her book Secretaries Talk,
expresses a sentiment common in feminist literature today: «no
one is at all clear what is involved in transforming the existing
(gender stereotyped) categories». Is it any wonder the women’s
movement is plagued by pessimism and hesitation? An analysis which
says half the human race has power over the other half must in the
end question whether this situation can be changed. A theory which
says capitalism could be replaced by socialism, but women’s
oppression could continue, ends up sliding into the idea that men
naturally and inevitably oppress women.

The
Marxist analysis is that the historical roots of women’s
oppression lie in class society. The specific forms this oppression
takes today are the result of the development of the capitalist
family and the needs of capital. Therefore the struggle to end the
rule of capital, the struggle for socialism, is also the struggle for
women’s liberation. Because class
is the fundamental division in society, when workers, both women and
men, fight back against any aspect of capitalism they can begin to
break down the sexism which divides them. Their struggle can begin to
«transform the existing categories».

In
The German Ideology
Marx argued that social relations between people are determined by
production. The various institutions of society can only be
understood as developing out of this core, productive interaction.
His argument applies as much to women’s oppression as to any
other aspect of capitalist society.

The
history of humanity is the history of changes to the way production
is organised. The new economic relations established with each mode
of production exert pressure on other social relations, making some
obsolete, remoulding others. So any institution must be examined
historically and in its relationship to other social relations. For
instance, an analysis of the family needs to be rooted in its
economic and social role and examine how it helps perpetuate the
existing relations of production.

Today
it is very popular for those influenced by Louis Althusser and others
to brand this approach as «reductionist». It is useful to
quote Lukács here again, as he can hardly be accused of
covering his back after this objection was raised. «The
category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an
undifferentiated uniformity, to identity». And «the
interaction we have in mind must be more than the interaction of
otherwise unchanging objects.»

Marx’s
proposition «men make their own history, but they do not make
it under circumstances chosen by themselves», sums up the
interaction we must look for between the ideas women and men use to
justify their actions and responses to social events and the material
and economic circumstances in which they operate. This differs
radically from the theoretical framework of patriarchy theory. The
most common versions take two forms. There are those like Juliet
Mitchell who see patriarchy in psychological and ideological terms:
«We are dealing with two autonomous areas, the economic mode of
capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy.» If you make
such a distinction between the economic and ideological, then you
cannot explain anything about the development of society. Why do some
ideas dominate? And why do some dominant ideas change?

However
I do not intend answering these ideas more fully because the
arguments which seem to offer a more serious challenge to Marxism are
not these but the other version of patriarchy theory argued by
writers like Heidi Hartmann. She criticised Juliet Mitchell:
«Patriarchy operates, Mitchell seems to be saying, (in
Psyche/analysis and Feminism)
primarily in the psychological realm … She clearly presents
patriarchy as the fundamental ideological structure, just as capital
is the fundamental economic structure.» Hartmann concludes
«although Mitchell discusses their interpenetration, her
failure to give patriarchy a material base in the relation between
women’s and men’s labour power, and her similar failure
to note the material aspects of the process of personality formation
and gender creation, limits the usefulness of her analysis.»

However,
Hartmann’s own attempt at a materialist analysis is not
grounded in the concept of society as a totality in which production
forms the basis for all social relations.

This
is a decidedly un-Marxist formulation, for all Hartmann’s
pretension to Marxist categories. It has much more in common with
structuralist and post-structuralist theories which take a mechanical
view of society as a series of social structures which can exist side
by side. They do not attempt to unite the social structures into a
coherent whole. In fact, they are often hostile to the very concept
of society as a totality, preferring a view of society as fragmented
and chaotic. «All attempts to establish a working framework of
ideas are regarded with the deepest suspicion.»

Hartmann,
while at pains to distinguish herself from the feminists who tended
towards a psychoanalytical explanation of women’s oppression,
uses fundamentally the same approach.

This
framework fits neatly with Hartmann’s view of society as both
capitalism and patriarchy. And along with all those who have taken on
board elements of this method, Hartmann downgrades class as the
fundamental determinant – because in the end you can’t
have two structures. One has to be primary, so her analysis does not
treat patriarchy and capitalism as two systems in partnership. She
argues that it was a conspiracy between male workers and capitalists
which established women’s oppression under capitalism. In other
words, patriarchy is more fundamental than capitalism. This is an
inbuilt confusion in theories which claim to «marry»
Marxism and patriarchy theory. Again and again, they have to read
their own prejudice into historical facts to fit the abstract and
mechanical notion of patriarchy.

We
can agree with feminists such as Hartmann that the family is the
source of women’s oppression today. But their analysis of how
and why this came about is fundamentally flawed. Summers says «the
institution (of the family) confers power on men». The argument
goes that, because men supposedly wanted to have women service them
in the home, they organised to keep women out of the best jobs. A
conspiracy of all men was responsible for women being driven into the
role of wife and mother, working in the worst paid and least skilled
jobs – if they were able to work at all.

Actually,
we don’t need a conspiracy theory of any kind to explain why
women are oppressed under capitalism. Women have been oppressed since
the division of society into classes. The capitalist family was
established as the result of the particular development of
capitalism. The effect of the industrial revolution on the working
class family was devastating. Friedrich Engels painted a horrifying
picture in The Conditions of the Working Class in England.
Whole industries were built on the basis of cheap female and child
labour during the industrial revolution in Britain. Engels gives
figures for the 1840s: of 419,560 factory operatives in the British
Empire, 242,296 were female, of whom almost half were under eighteen.
Almost half the male workers were under eighteen. Women made up
56.25% of workers in the cotton factories, 69.5% in the woollen
mills, 70.5% in flax-spinning mills.

Diseases
such as typhus raged in industrial slums, drunkenness was widespread
and there was a «general enfeeblement of the frame in the
working class.» In Manchester, more than fifty-seven percent of
working class children died before the age of five. These statistics
disturbed the more far-sighted sections of the capitalist class.

The
working class of the early industrial revolution was drawn from the
peasantry, driven off the land by enclosures of the common lands and
other measures. But as this source began to dry up, the bosses began
to realise they needed to find a way to ensure the reproduction of a
working class at least healthy and alert enough not to fall asleep at
the machines. And more and more they needed an educated, skilled
workforce.

The
solution they came up with was the nuclear family. This is hardly
surprising when we consider that the bourgeoisie themselves lived in
the family. Workers fresh from the countryside were used to working
and living in peasant families. It was accepted without question that
women should be responsible for childcare and most domestic duties.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a massive ideological
campaign by the middle and upper classes to reverse the trend away
from the working class family and to force women more decisively into
the roles of wife and mother. This was backed up by attempts to
ameliorate at least the worst aspects of working class life,
especially those which endangered women and their ability to produce
healthy children.

The
same process was repeated here in Australia. If anything, the family
was even more severely disrupted because of the transportation of
convicts and the general lawlessness of the frontier society in the
first years of the nineteenth century. Shortages of labour were acute
in the early years of the colony, because of the distance from the
home country and lack of free settlers. This pushed the colonial
ruling class to try to find a solution even earlier than in Britain.

They
situate the attempts to confine women to the home, to establish the
«feminine» stereotype, firmly in the ruling class’s
drive to stamp their authority on the new colony. They argue that
women «disappeared into domesticity in the age of the bourgeois
ascendancy». From this time on we no longer see women
entrepreneurs like Mary Reibey or Rosetta Terry who had run
successful businesses and been prominent in other public ventures in
the earlier years of the settlement.

Connell
and Irving argue that «by the 1860s the lack of parental
guidance and education among working-class children was recognised as
a major problem of social control.» After the 1870s, living
standards declined as the cities grew rapidly. In the 1880s, infant
mortality rates were higher in Sydney than in London. So if anything,
the campaign for the family was even more strident here than in
Britain. And it certainly was not a campaign by all men, but by the
ruling class, male and female, and its middle class supporters both
male and female.

The
idea that male workers joined in an alliance with their male bosses
to carry out this scheme so they could get power over women is simply
not borne out by the facts. Men did not rush into the family,
chaining women to the kitchen sink and smothering them with babies’
nappies. As late as 1919, it was reported in the NSW Legislative
Assembly that there was a high proportion of bachelors in Australia.

Anne
Summers herself admits that «many women resisted being forced
into full-time domesticity, just as men resented being forced to
support a number of dependent and unproductive family members.»
This goes some way to explaining why «the taming and
domestication of the self-professed independent man became a standard
theme in late nineteenth century fiction, especially that written by
women». So men had to be cajoled and ideologically convinced of
the benefits of home life – they did not go out to enforce it.
Family desertions were very common. But just everyday, ordinary life
meant for many workers – working on ships, moving around the
country looking for work, doing itinerant and seasonal jobs such as
cane cutting, droving, shearing, whaling and sealing – that
they were not serviced by their wives’ labour in the home much
at all.

In
any case, when a man took on the responsibility of feeding a wife and
children from the low and unreliable wage he earned, he actually
faced a worsening of conditions. Stuart McIntyre has shown that
working class families living at the turn of the century were most
likely to suffer poverty during the years when they had small
children.

Summers
makes this point herself: «indeed they (men) will generally be
better off if they remain single.» She dismisses it by assuming
that a wife’s services, the emotional security of a
relationship «as well as the feelings of pride and even
aggrandizement associated with fathering and supporting children»
outweigh the minor inconvenience of not having enough money to live
on. This is a typically middle class attitude; that the ability to
survive could be less important than «emotional security»,
or that it could reliably exist in a life of poverty and degradation.
In any case, on both these criteria – emotional security and
the pride of parenthood – it would have to be said women have a
stake in the family. It is precisely the yearning to realise these
often unattainable goals which does partly underpin the acceptance of
the family as the ideal. They tell us nothing about whether the
family bestows power on men or not.

This
argument is not meant to idealise workers. Sexist ideas about women
are as old as class society. So it is not surprising that male
workers were sexist and accepted the standard stereotyped view of
women. But that is not the same as being in an alliance with male
bosses. And it did not mean they strove to establish the stifling,
restrictive existence of the nuclear family. It simply means they
were the product of given social relations not of their own making.
«The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and
then amplified by penal conditions.»

The
fact is that it was the ruling class, via magazines produced for
workers, who actually argued for women to become homemakers, wives
and mothers above all else. That is why every mass circulation
magazine, every middle class voice shouted the virtues of womanhood –
a certain kind of womanhood that is (as they still do today). And it
is clear that the overwhelming arguments for women to be primarily
housewives came from women.

Connell
and Irving rightly drew the connection between the establishment of
bourgeois society in Australia and the fight to establish the
«feminine» stereotype for women: «The women (in the
social elite) … played an active role in maintaining class
consciousness through their policing of gentility.»

Of
course, these women were not feminists. But some of the most advanced
women of the middle classes of the time, the suffragists as they were
called, mouthed the honeyed phrases promising women the approval of
respectable society if only they would devote themselves to the care
of their husbands and children. Vida Goldstein was a famous feminist.
In 1903 her paper, Australian Woman’s Sphere
recommended that women’s education should include instruction
on baby care. Goldstein defended the women’s movement from
attacks that said emancipation meant women were refusing to have
children by insisting that on the contrary, women were awakening to a
truer sense of their maternal responsibility, and that most wanted a
career in motherhood – hardly a departure from the sexist ideas
of bourgeois society. Maybanke Anderson espoused women’s
suffrage and higher education for women but also compulsory domestic
science for schoolgirls, and sexual repression.

The
bosses wanted the family and they had to fight for it. Workers, both
men and women, had to be goaded, pushed and coaxed into accepting
ruling class ideas of a «decent» life. The argument that
women’s role in the family was somehow established by an
alliance of all men simply ignores the influence of not only middle
class and bourgeois respectable women, but also the feminists
of the time who were vastly more influential – because of
material wealth and organisation and ideological influence through
newspapers and the like – than working class men.

Hartmann
argues: «the development of family wages secured the material
base for male domination in two ways. First, men have the better jobs
in the labour market and earn higher wages than women.» This
«encourages women to choose wifery as a career. Second, then,
women do housework, childcare, and perform other services at home
which benefit men directly. Women’s home responsibilities in
turn reinforce their inferior labour market position.» The
argument that the establishment of a family wage institutionalised
women as housewives and mothers earning low wages if they went to
work is widely accepted. Lindsey German and Tony Cliff accept that
the working class supported the idea of a family wage in Britain. In
August 1989, I wrote: «the family wage helped establish the
connection between sex stereotypes and the workplace.» And the
«gender divisions … in the Australian workforce …
were codified and legitimised by the Harvester Judgement of 1907.»
I am now much more sceptical about this argument.

Most
feminist historians hold up the Harvester Judgement of 1907 as
decisive in institutionalising the family wage and low wages for
women in Australia. They argue it was a turning point in establishing
the gender division in the work force and the idea that women don’t
need to work, because they should have a breadwinner. Justice
H.B. Higgins, as President of the Commonwealth Arbitration
Court, heard a test case involving H.V. McKay, proprietor of the
Sunshine Harvester works in Victoria. Higgins awarded what he called
a «living wage» based on what a male worker with a wife
and «about three children» needed to live on. He awarded
7s a day plus 3s for skill. Women’s wages were set at 54% of
the male rate.

It
may have been used as the rationale for lower wages for women, but it
certainly did not instigate the concept. Nor did it initiate the
gender divisions in the workplace. To prove that this judgement was
decisive in establishing women’s position in the home and at
work, it would have to be shown that it established lower pay for
women than before and drove women out of the workforce. Neither is
the case.

It
is well known that convict women in the early years of settlement
were always regarded as cheap labour. And as Connell and Irving point
out, «a sex-segregated labour market was established» by
1810. In that year, of about 190 jobs advertised in the Sydney Gazette,
only seven were for women. Of those, six were for positions as
household servants. Most of the women immigrants brought to Australia
by the efforts of Caroline Chisholm in the 1840s were employed as
housekeepers and maids. By and large, women’s wages were lower
than men’s from the earliest development of industry. In the
1860s, in the Victorian Woollen Mills, men earned 35s a week while
women received 10s and girls 4s. In 1896, the Clothing Trades Wages
Board in Melbourne fixed women’s wages at 44% of men’s –
3s 4d against 7s 6d for men. New South Wales didn’t even
introduce a minimum wage until 1907. Its aim was «to prevent
employment of young girls in millinery and dressmaking for nothing
for periods of six months to two years»!

Any
agitation for a family wage has to be seen in the context of the
ruling class’s push to establish the family. Again and again,
the ruling class has had to campaign around these ideas, partly
because workers have not taken them up with the enthusiasm they
wanted, but also because capitalism itself continually undermines the
family. The slump of the 1890s disrupted family life, with men
travelling around the country looking for work, or simply deserting
their families in despair. By the early 1900s, birth rates had fallen
to the lowest in the world. So it is not accidental that the ruling
class looked for ways to strengthen the family and the ideas
associated with it. It is in this light that we have to view the
Harvester judgement and the general climate at the time which has led
many feminists to identify this as the turning point for the position
of women in Australia.

The
feminist argument that decisions such as the Harvester judgement are
the decisions of patriarchy, an alliance between male workers and
male bosses, does not stand up any better. Leave aside that it made
no appreciable difference to the material conditions of women, it
certainly cannot be shown to have brought any great boon to male
workers. The amount of 7s a week was not a living wage for a family
of five. Higgins said he wanted to award «merely enough to keep
body and soul together.» In fact, he left out any consideration
of lighting, clothing, boots, furniture, utensils, rates, life
insurance, unemployment, union dues, books and newspapers, tram and
train fares, school requisites, leisure of any kind, intoxicating
liquors, tobacco, sickness, religion or expenditure for
contingencies. A confusion in the hearing resulted in the allowance
for skill of 3s, one shilling less than members of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers got for the same work.

In
the end, the decision was overturned a year later. But Higgins was
still awarding 7s many years later, in spite of 27% inflation. No
wonder Buckley and Wheelwright point out dryly that «trade
unionists at the time (unlike historians later) showed little
interest in the Harvester judgement.» If male workers were
involved in some alliance with capital, they certainly got very
little monetary reward for their part in it.

The
idea that the capitalists were in some kind of alliance with working
class men to get women into the home is ludicrous when we look at the
conditions men worked under. In the depression of the 1890s,
thousands were sacked, wages plummeted and most trade unions were
either completely destroyed or reduced to a miserable rump. In 1905
there were 2500 to 3000 wharf labourers and coal lumpers in Sydney.
At least 1500 of them could not earn enough to live on. And at this
time male shop assistants, some of the few workers who consistently
worked a full week, could not afford to marry unless their wife
worked. Such «rewards» were hardly calculated to keep men
on side for the dubious (and mostly unrealised) benefit of having a
wife to wait on them. Furthermore, given that the bosses were in such
a strong position, there is no reason why they needed an alliance
with male workers. They got what they wanted anyway. A more
reasonable explanation is that these conditions convinced men that
the family wage would raise their living standards.

The
concept of a family wage was then of some ideological importance. It
strengthened the already prevalent conception about women’s
role in the home, and how «decent» people should live.
But a true family wage was never a reality for more than a small
minority of workers. An important fact which shows that workers’
families couldn’t live on one wage was the huge number of
married women who continued to work. In the half century from 1841 to
1891, the number of women in Britain’s textile mills grew by
221%. In Australia, the picture was much the same. Working class
women have always worked in large numbers. In 1891, 40% of women aged
18–25 worked. And they continued to work in sizable numbers in
the twentieth century, even before the massive growth in their
numbers following the Second World War.

Men
did take up sexist ideas about women’s role – this is
hardly surprising given the ruling class campaign was backed up even
by the feminists of the time. But it is not the case that men argued
for the family wage or protective legislation and the like on the
basis that they wanted women to be their unpaid chattels in the home.
The situation is more complex than that.

We
might not agree that the solution was for women to be confined to the
home. But the man quoted does not talk of women making life easier
for men. He says quite clearly that the family wage is seen as a way
of alleviating the horrible conditions endured by women in the
workplace.

This
is an outrageous assertion with no facts to back it up. The only
basis can be her own prejudice. She does not document any examples of
male workers opposing pay rises for women, or arguing that they
should service them in the home. The feminist interpretation misses
the complexity of the relationship of ideas and material
circumstances. Workers are products of this society, and the ideas of
the ruling class dominate their thinking. But they are not empty
vessels which simply take up every phrase and idea of the ruling
class just as it is intended. Workers found their material
circumstances unbearable. One response when trying to find a way out
was to take up ideas propagated by the bosses and use them in their
own way and to their own advantage. So the demand for women to be
able to live in the family is at the same time repeating bourgeois
ideas and an attempt to raise living standards.

Male
workers, whether for exclusion of women, for a family wage, or for
unionisation of women, were mostly worried about the use of women as
cheap labour to undercut conditions and pay generally. Ray Markey,
who has done a detailed study of the Australian working class in the
latter half of last century, notes that «broadly, the labour
movement’s response to female entry into the workforce was
twofold: one of humanitarian concern and workers’ solidarity,
and one of fear.» 1891–2, the New South Wales Trades and
Labour Council maintained a strong campaign against sweating,
particularly of women, and assisted in the formation of unions of
unskilled workers, of which a sizable minority were women. In this
case, male trade unionists were involved in organising women as
workers – not driving them out of the workplace.

Hartmann
implies that male workers supported protective factory legislation
because this restricted the work women could do. This was the result
of much protective legislation. But at least here in Australia, it
does not seem to have been the motivating force behind union support
for it. And once again, middle class reformers saw protective
legislation as one way of improving the conditions of working women.

Carol
Bacchi argues that «most suffragists favoured special factory
legislation for factory women». She comments that few realised
that this placed them under a competitive handicap. That is why I say
the facts have to be distorted and misinterpreted to draw the
conclusion that protective legislation was a deliberate ploy by males
to limit women’s employment opportunities.

Markey
says of the attitudes of workers: «Hopefully, it was the thin
edge of the wedge: once protection for some workers was accepted on
the statute books, it might be easier to extend it later.»
Overall, protective legislation did improve working conditions.
Children especially gained from restrictions on the hours they could
be made to work.

Anne
Summers criticises male trade unionists for only supporting
unionisation of women for fear of their own conditions being
undercut, not for the conditions of the women. Markey replies to this
criticism; he says the maritime strike of 1890 taught many workers of
the danger of having a mass of unorganised workers.

Similar
fears had probably motivated the male tailors in encouraging the
organisation of the tailoresses. However, far from denigrating the
‘class solidarity’ of the union movement, this merely
emphasises the material basis of class organisation.

Markey
makes an important point. Summers expresses a fundamental
misunderstanding common not just among feminists: that is, a
confusion between the material circumstances people react to and the
ideas they use to justify their actions. Mostly people act because of
their material situation, not simply because of ideas. Whatever the
reasons given for trade union organisation, it is a progressive step.
So while it is true that unions such as the Printers and the
Engineering Union prior to World War II tried to exclude women, other
Australian unions had quite a good record of defending women workers.
In the early 1890s, a strike by women laundry workers over one worker
being victimised at Pyrmont in Sydney got wide support, as did the
Tailoresses’ Union in 1882 in Victoria. Neither the actions,
nor even the arguments made for the worst positions, paint a picture
of some united campaign by male workers in connivance with male
capitalists to force women to be simply their domestic servants.

While
the facts suggest that by and large workers did not show overwhelming
enthusiasm for the family, it does seem that this campaign did not
fall on completely barren soil. Workers gradually came to see the
family as a haven in a cruel world. It offered the prospect of a home
where children could have some care, where women could have their
children away from the debilitating conditions of the factory. And
gradually, the family took root, becoming one of the most important
institutions for the maintenance of capitalism. In this way women’s
oppression became structured into capitalism.

The
family became absolutely central for the reproduction of the labour
force – not a minor consideration for the system. It provided a
cheap means of reproduction and socialisation of the next generation.
Individual working class families were forced to take responsibility
for child care, the health of their children, teaching them habits of
conformity and respect for authority at minimal expense to the state
or individual bosses. The existence of the family helps reinforce the
relations of production; capitalists buy the labour power of workers
like any other commodity, and its price is kept as low as possible by
the role of the family. So labour performed in the home does not
benefit other members of the family – itbenefits
the capitalist class who buy the labour power of workers.

Apart
from this economic role, the family plays an ideological role of
central importance for the maintenance and stability of the society.
The consolidation of the family entrenched the sexual stereotypes of
man and woman, living in married bliss and raising happy, healthy
children. This in turn provided an excuse for low wages for women.
The assumption was more and more that they would have a male
breadwinner. Each generation is socialised to expect marriage and
family responsibilities, so getting a job and accepting the drudgery
of work seems normal and unquestionable behaviour. At times it forces
workers to accept poor conditions for fear of losing their job and
not being able to provide for their family.

As
the sex stereotypes became established, anyone who stepped outside
this narrow view of life was seen as strange, as challenging the very
fabric of society. This was no accident. It was part of the overall
campaign to curtail the sexual relations of the «lower orders»
and establish a unified, orderly capitalist society in Australia. As
the cycle developed, it was increasingly perceived as «natural»
for women to stay at home with the children. This was reinforced by
the fact that their wages were inevitably lower than what men could
earn. So women with small children were often forced out of the
workforce and into the home.

Once
we look at the development of the family as satisfying a very real
need of capitalism itself, and the massive ideological offensive by
the ruling class and their supporters, the picture is very different
from that painted by the feminists. There was no conspiracy between
male workers and capitalists. In as far as workers accepted the
family, it was because they expected it to bring an improvement in
their living standard. There is no separate power structure of
patriarchy. The capitalists and their allies in the middle classes
fought for and won very important changes in order to take the system
forward. To workers at the time, it seemed like a gain for them too.
And in some ways it was. Given the low level of production at the
time, the poor methods of contraception and the absence of state
welfare, it is ahistorical and utopian to expect that workers could
have had expectations very different from those of the right to a
family wage, and the supposed shelter of the family home.

Marx
warned in his writings of three consequences of seeing society as an
undifferentiated whole, of not putting production at the centre of
our analysis. First it can lead to the view that society is
unchanging, seeing society in an ahistorical way, with social
relations governed by eternal laws. Second, it can lead to idealism,
with the dynamic of society lying in some mystical force outside it.
And third, it can lead to the view «that what exists today can
only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and
ideas».

It
is popular today to try to graft structuralist and post-structuralist
theories onto Marxism. This has been the road to accepting the theory
of patriarchy for many Marxists. However, all these theories display
the problems Marx talked about. Foucault, who has become popular with
many feminists, equates every relationship between humans with a
power struggle, a completely ahistorical concept, and certainly not a
new one. Thomas Hobbes, the bourgeois philosopher of the seventeenth
century, was convinced that the basic drive in society was the «war
of all against all».

The
epitome of the problem is the fascination with «discourse»
or language. It has taken on an explicitly idealist content. Chris
Weedon, an American feminist makes these typical comments: «Feminist
post-structuralist criticism can show how power is exercised through
discourse.» And «power is invested in and exercised
through her who speaks.» Consequently some feminists see
literary criticism as their main area of struggle.

Rosemary
Pringle takes up the theme here in Australia, illustrating what it
means to accept what exists in its own terms, through its own
language and ideas. She argues that we have to find a way to
«privilege» the «feminine discourse». Women
should find ways to use their femininity to «disempower»
men. She doesn’t know how. But is it any wonder she can’t
tell us how? Ideas do not come from out of the blue, they are not
divorced from the material conditions which give rise to them:

The
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourse of men – the language of real life.

Femininity
is part of the ideological baggage of capitalism and the family. It
is part of the way women’s oppression is reinforced day in and
day out. It cannot be used to undermine women’s oppression. The
most apt reply to Pringle is that made by Marx to the idealist Young
Hegelians in the 1840s:

This
demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the
existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognise it by means of
a different interpretation.

Women’s
femininity means flirting, passiveness, being «sexy»,
available and yet chaste. Such behaviour reinforces the idea that
women are trivial, passive and purely of decorative value. For it to
«disempower» men (assuming they have power, which I
don’t), women would have to somehow convince men to interpret
such behaviour to mean women are serious, aggressive and valuable
human beings. So instead of arguing to challenge the stereotypes, of
fighting for liberation
as the early women’s movement did, feminism has gone full
circle to espouse a profoundly conservative outlook.

This
is the dead end to which the ideas of male power and patriarchy have
led. Feminist articles in journals and papers are very good at
documenting the horrific conditions most women endure. But they have
precious little to say about how to begin to change the society which
creates them. Take Gender at Work
by Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. It catalogues very well the
problems of women at work. It is very good at searching out offensive
behaviour by male workers. But nowhere, not once, is there a mention
of the possibility of solidarity between men and women in struggle to
change the situation. In 1981, only two years before it was
published, there was a strike of 200 women textile workers in
Brunswick, Melbourne. The Kortex strike was a graphic and inspiring
example of how class struggle can radically alter relations in the
home. Husbands, brothers, sons and lovers willingly did housework,
cooked and minded children so the women could more effectively fight
for their $25 pay rise, which they won. Because they ignore such
examples, Game and Pringle can offer no way out of the entrenched
discrimination and gender stereotypes women suffer from.

Most
feminists have abandoned any identification with socialism. This is
not surprising, because if patriarchy is a power structure separate
from capitalism the latter can be overthrown, leaving the former
intact. This idea is given some credence by the Stalinism of most of
the left, which has kept alive the ludicrous idea that the Stalinist
countries arc socialist, in spite of the continuing oppression of
women.

Because
Marxism recognises that class divisions in society are fundamental,
that women’s oppression arises from the particular way
capitalism developed, it locates the way forward in the struggle
against the very society itself. Men do behave badly, do act in
sexist ways, do beat and rape women in the home. Feminists interpret
this as the enactment of male power. The Marxist reply is not to
simply say these are the actions of men shaped by the society they
grow up in. That is only one side to the argument. The other is to
point out, as Marx did, that «men make their own history».
While humans are the products of society they are also conscious,
thinking beings. As I showed, ideas propagated by the ruling class
are not simply taken up by workers in a straightforward way. They are
refracted through working class experience and interpreted in various
ways. The middle class women who fought for the family did so by
arguing that women should be «feminine» and restricted to
the role of housewife and mother. Working class men saw in the family
the prospect of improved living conditions, so they argued for a
family wage on the grounds it would improve women’s lot.

Ruling
class ideas are never completely hegemonic. In every class society,
the exploited and oppressed have fought back against their rulers in
one way or another. So no matter how tightly the ruling class try to
organise their hold on society, they cannot completely wipe out the
ideas and traditions of struggle and resistance which come down to
each generation from the past.

Of
course there is no iron rule that society will be seething with
revolution at any particular point in time. In the last ten years, we
have seen a massive shift to the right in the political ideas most
current in society, continuing a drift which was identifiable from
the mid-seventies. This change in the political climate is
underpinned by the Labor government’s talk of «consensus»,
and demands that workers make sacrifices «in the national
interest». As Labor has led the bosses’ attempts to cut
living standards and reorganise their economy, workers have suffered
a number of defeats and had their trade union organisation weakened.
On the one hand we see affirmative action for some women, reflecting
gains won during the period when the workers’ movement was on
the offensive. On the other, we see no end in sight to violence in
the home, as families struggle to cope with worsening living
standards, the strain of unemployment, poor health care and the like.

In
Britain and the United States and to a lesser extent here, we have
seen attacks on abortion rights and gay and lesbian rights. The fact
that they have met with a militant and vigorous response shows the
situation can be reversed. All of history shows that the exploited
and oppressed cannot be kept in submission indefinitely. And history
also shows that it is when they begin to fight back that the horrible
ideas of capitalism can begin to be broken down, precisely because
the circumstances which perpetuate them are ripped asunder. Anyone
who saw the women tramways workers on pickets, approaching shoppers
for money and support in the lockout by the Victorian Labor
government early in 1990 got a glimpse of what we mean.

Tony
Cliff has shown the relationship of the high points in epic class
struggles and the position of women and the struggle for liberation.
A couple of examples will sketch the point here. In the revolution in
China, 1925–27, led by the working class in the cities and
supported with gusto by the peasantry in the countryside, there were
moves to stop the barbarous practices such as foot binding which
oppressed women so harshly. In revolutionary Spain, in 1936, a
country dominated by the sexism of Catholicism, women could go about
among male workers without fear of rape, and participate in the most
untypical activities without derision. The very rise of the women’s
liberation movement was related to the high level of struggle by the
working class in the late sixties, as well as the entry into the
workforce and out of the isolation of the home by greater numbers of
women. And one of the first demands of the revolution in Romania in
1990 was abortion on demand for women.

Every
time there has been a lull in the struggle, ideas of pessimism, ideas
which say the working class cannot offer a way forward, are sung from
the roof tops. But these kinds of struggles will break out again. The
events in Eastern Europe are shaking the world system not just in the
East. In every strike, every demonstration of protest, no matter how
small, there lies the seed of struggles which could rip capitalism
apart. It is not simply a matter of ideas, of education which
convinces workers of different ideas. The struggle creates a material
reason
to
change – the need for
solidarity
in opposition
to
their rulers can, in certain circumstances, quite rapidly break down
the divisions
which in other
times hold
workers
back.

The
fight for
women’s
liberation
begins there. The idea that men have power
over
women
can do
nothing
but get in the way. It reinforces
the division
of
sexism. Men are sexist today.
But women’s
oppression
does
not
equal male power.
If we see the fight against sexism as separate from
the class struggle, we can easily fall into
seeing working
class men as an enemy. In reality, they are potential
allies. In the seventies when building workers
were confident
of
their union
strength the Builders’ Labourers’
Federation
(BLF) supported
women’s
right to
work
on
building sites. Every defence of
abortion
rights against the Right to
Life has received support
from
large numbers of
men. In the mass abortion
campaign against Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government
in 1979–80, men were able to
be won
to
support
the struggle, including transport
workers
at Email, who
stopped
work
to
join
a picket. In 1986, BLF support
for
the nurses’ strike in Victoria
challenged their sexist ideas about
the role
of
women.

Once
we understand that working
class men have nothing
to
gain from
women’s
oppression,
we can see the possibility
of
breaking them from
sexist ideas. Then we can be confident
that workers,
women
and men fighting side by side in solidarity,
can begin to
change the «existing categories».
There is nothing
automatic
about
changes in consciousness
in struggle. But with an understanding of
the roots
of
women’s
oppression,
socialists
can intervene around
these issues and relate them to
the experience of
workers’
struggles.

Women
are better placed today
to
fight for
liberation
than in any time in history.
They are no
longer
simply housewives.
They are half the working
class and able to
exercise the power
of
that class alongside
male workers.
Ultimately, it is the struggle of
the working
class which can destroy
the very social
structures which gave rise to
women’s
oppression
in the first place.